Pirate Bay 2.0: Pay Pirates to Become Consumers

The Swedish gaming executive who’s gambling nearly $8 million buying The Pirate Bay is convinced he can turn the 20 million users of the world’s most notorious file sharing site into well-behaved consumers — even amid a deluge of account-deletion requests.

“Some file-sharers don’t like all this money talk, and they’re leaving,” acknowledged Hans Pandeya, chief executive of the Global Gaming Factory, in a telephone interview with Wired.com on Wednesday. But “the user experience is going to be the same. From the user’s point of view, they’re doing a search, they’re finding the song or the movie, and they’re downloading it.”

There are other changes planned for that user experience, of course, once The Pirate Bay lowers the Jolly Roger and raises the flag of commerce — as early as next month. The free video games, pre-release Hollywood blockbusters and gigabyte-length discographies that currently dominate the site’s most-popular list will be gone, replaced by whatever content the movie, music and software industries deign to sell — yes, sell — on the site they’ve been battling for years.

Global Gaming Factory announced plans Tuesday to purchase The Pirate Bay’s BitTorrent site for $7.8 million. The Pirate Bay’s other projects, including the upcoming streaming-video site TheVideoBay and the iPredator anonymizing service, are not part of the sale, the Bay’s current management said.

But the unfolding exodus from the Bay seems to be an early sign that file sharers aren’t eager for change. “Many people have asked about having their account removed, and we will not force anyone to stay on of course,” the site posted to its blog Tuesday.

Pandeya believes he’ll be able to stay the mutiny once the community — which he describes as the “key asset” in the announced purchase — fully understands what the new Pirate Bay will be offering.

That would be money, for starters. The revamped Bay will be the first BitTorrent site to pay members cold hard cash for seeding the paid content they download — a sweetener that Pandeya said will give the site an edge even over established pay-content outlets.

“If you use iTunes, for instance, their users can’t create any revenue,” he said. “We can create revenue for the file-sharing community…. At the end of the day, the file sharers will make money, or this is not going to work.”

Details, like how much uploaders will be paid for sharing their bandwidth, haven’t been announced. But it would need to be a lot to match the value lost to a community accustomed to getting $60 console games for the cost of a button-click.

It’s also unclear that the content industry will rush to embrace The Pirate Bay, a name as synonymous with piracy as Bill Gates is to Microsoft.

“We don’t know the details, and there are many questions to ask about how this will work in practice,” said John Kennedy, chairman of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. The Motion Picture Association of America said the studios “don’t have enough information to comment at this time.”

Those content-producers will come around, said Pandeya. “Hollywood has a community that they can’t reach today. There’s a lot of free file sharing going on, and Hollywood will want to reach them.”

The final plank in Pandeya’s plans involves a new improved version of the BitTorrent protocol under development by Peerialism, another Swedish company Global Gaming Factory purchased Tuesday.

In theory, it works like this: When a Pirate Bay member purchases, for example, an authorized movie from the site, the user will download the film through the customized, “next generation” BitTorrent client.

Instead of that movie arriving piecemeal from other clients all over the world, the new application will favor peers geographically close to the consumer. That would increase the speed of the download, lessen global bandwidth demands and ease ISPs’ exit traffic.

“We’re talking about upgrading BitTorrent and taking it to the next step,” Pandeya said.

Pandeya believes ISPs, looking to save on transit costs, will purchase the new technology themselves, to allow downloads on their networks to be smarter — providing The Pirate Bay with another income stream. Advertising will also continue on the site, he said.

Members will also be able to share their own files, as they are now — though the new Pirate Bay will deploy filters to try to block infringing content.

Under the current BitTorrent model,”if a thousand people all pull the same file, the cable network may actually be paying for trans-Atlantic bandwidth,” said Labovitz. “It costs them money and is limiting resources available for others.”

ISPs would also have to secure assurances that the protocol isn’t another venue for pirated works,” Labovitz said.

Pandeya acknowledged that the future of the site depends entirely on keeping its current community happy. The Pirate Bay, after all, isn’t the only BitTorrent site.

“If file sharers are not happy,” he said, “they’ll just go to the next site.”